Re: Firefox 2 End Of Life

Mike Beltzner <beltzner@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Presently 2/3rds of our users are using Firefox 3, with more than
> 50% accepting the first major upgrade offer back in late August.
> We're looking through Hendrix and other sources to understand why
> people didn't want to upgrade and ensure that those bugs have been
> fixed - if you know of any that would result in the product not
> working on a user's system, please point it out. Please do not point
> out UI changes - those objections are well understood.

I've heard two issues over and over again:-

 - the places fsync problem and related urlbar performance problems
   (gone in 3.1, one hopes)
 - must have a particular extension

Regarding the second, you said you were "watching add-on compatibility
numbers to ensure that the vast majority of Firefox 2 add-ons *still
under development* have been made compatible with Firefox 3".  Well, in
the majority of cases where I've had that come up, the extension in
question was *not* still under development, but was clearly still
heavily used (just looking at the trail of comments on AMO begging for
an upgrade).

I think it might be worthwhile to devote some of our attention to
popular but unmaintained extensions.  We could, for instance, have
some sort of "adoption agency" on AMO which lists unmaintained
extensions and encourages third-party developers to take them over.
(The Debian package adoption procedure might be a model.)  It might
even be worth spending internal developer effort on updating extensions
where the fix looks to be easy.

zw